skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think iOS is his test bed and easy way to get paid, fast. Web could pretty easily follow. I even say as much at the bottom of the article :-)
The Future of Web Gaming | Tech talk
Mock him if you must.

Panetta raises the issue that a combination of attacks could cause loss of life and a new sense of vulnerability among the public. (From the article: "...would cause physical destruction and the loss of life, an attack that would paralyze and shock the nation and create a profound new sense of vulnerability.")

The last time the public had that sudden sense of vulnerability, on 9/11 of course, there was a tremendous and partly counterproductive reaction that we're still dealing with.

It could be smarter to put in place laws to force private companies to report cyberattacks, so the government can understand the scope of the problem, than to pay for the reactive spasms that would follow a successful attack.
The guy who wrote AOL Mail, Jay Levitt, just died. So long Jay.
Only on reduced loads per unit of content time. At least to date. It's a nuance, but it's non-trivial.
Ask HN: Tools of the trade, 2012 edition
What SaaS tools do you use to build your software/company?
Thanks a lot. Cool ideas.
A quick question on second idea, except HN others already categorize posts based on tags. Why would a user need to visit another website to explore the same?
I have a genius plan to protect computers and networks from cyber attacks, I plan on selling it to the Government I really think it's a good idea. My asking price will be at least $1.2 billion for a minimum 10 year contract, but I'd be willing to negotiate a little bit to stay competitive with competitors like Lockheed.

1) Disconnect any computer from the Internet that controls anything that can be compromised.

2) Keep the computers disconnected.

BAM! no Internet connection, no cyber-security threat. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm just going to fire up my Ubuntu terminal and derail a passenger train full of chemicals whilst simultaneously breaking down a dam wall in another terminal window.

Seriously though, I think we're all doomed if dams, nuclear reactors, airports and passenger train networks are as accessible from the Internet as Panetta says they are in the first place...
How Cell-Phone Data Could Slow the Spread of Malaria
Good thing we didn't provoke Iran by attacking with cyber-warfare.
The more I've used Instapaper, the more I'm convinced that the version on the iPad (especially retina) is the best reading experience out there, period. And as a huge supporter of long-form journalism and technology lover, this is a dream come true. Hope it pays off for Marco.
Ask HN: Need info on how to start building iPhone accessories
Hi,

I am a software guy. I know almost nothing about hardware. I mean I don't know how to build a circuit board which ICs to put in. I have seen that there are few iPhone accessories that are not there in the market and if I can bring in those then that can become a big business. Could you please point me in the direction that I should start-with like any vendors or individuals you know that can help me in this. I don't have huge money to approach Foxconn (pun intended)
Curiosity Rover Finds Rock Type That's Never Been Seen on Mars
Looks like 70*0.125
That was my second thought too. Either way, not exactly what was intended.
Counterpoint: maybe just name it what you think is the best name and assume you'll be able to figure out the rest.
This article isn't put across in a very balanced way. In fact I cut short my response when you said "Fuck you Douglas" because my hopes of receiving a civil reply evaporated. Anyway;

> I say we have a reasonable expectation that people writing code that does financial calculations have a fucking clue as to how their math will work on a computer.

No we don't.

> He goes on to suggest that the right way to handle this is by scaling your values to be in cents (or whatever quanta you happen to care about). It's interesting to see DSP-world fixed point evangelism suddenly materialize in JavaScript. Be warned: unless you heavily wrap this scaled approach in objects, you will make a mistake somewhere.

What? It's more likely you'll make a mistake dealing in whole cents than doing floating point math? Really?
I started with Linux many years ago and used various distributions. I rarley had any driver issues. Sine some years now, I am using OpenBSD for all my personal stuff. My desktop and my server. I will never go back to any Linux Distribution as OpenBSD is so much cleaner, consistent, easier to use and better documented than any other distribution out there. There are two problems with OpenBSD. At first the hardware support. I choose my machines carefully so that OpenBSD is supported which is not that easy sometimes. The second problem is the JVM. At my work place, everything runs on Linux servers with Oracle JVMs so I have to use that. OpenJDK 7 is already pretty stable on OpenBSD but the behaviour can vary too much so that this is not an option.
Holy Wars
Show HN: Calculating the probability of winning the US Presidential Election
Using daily data from electoral-vote.com, I calculate the probability of either candidate winning the presidential election.

http://prespredict.com

Note:
* I submitted this about three months ago, and there is much more data on the site now.

* It is somewhat similar to 538, and as far as I can tell, I'm using a simpler model but still getting numbers close to those on 538.

* I have also added results from 2004, which shows an interesting parallel to Bush's chances after his first disastrous debate with Kerry. He was eventually able to overcome that by the end of the third debate.
Yeah, that was my line of thinking, too.

Hasn't turned out to be true for me. The 256 GB are quite limiting to me.

Things that eat up a lot of space on my SSD:

- eMail: dozen's of GB, but I wan't to be able to read them offline
- Virtual Machine, I run Windows 7 with 50 GB allocated space
- clumsy programs which eat a lot of disk space like Visual Studio
- Videos that I record from experiments
- recorded data from said experiments - when you record at 1kHz space goes up fast
- mp3 music
I was a big fan of OpenBSD for personal servers (not desktops), but my new ARM server put an end to that, by necessity.
Page Flip Effect in HTML 5
Stripe are absolutely killing it right now, well since the beginning really. The amount of growth this company has gone through in the last 18 months alone is impressive. If I were Paypal I'd be starting to get really worried once Stripes takes off on a global scale and has the same kind of reach as Paypal.

Just waiting for Square to hit Australia and I'll be first on-board the Stripe train.
Clickable: http://prespredict.com

Clickable 2004, for the historical perspective: http://prespredict.com/elec2004.html
Wow, it wasn't that long ago when this was flamebait of the highest order.

Linux has always been better at supporting a wider array of consumer hardware than *BSD. That combined with the Unix(TM) lawsuit lead to the quick early commercial success of Linux on 32-bit Intel hardware. The rise of the internet did the rest.
Instapaper for iPad is almost ethereal in the brilliance of its reading experience. I assume he wanted to maintain that level of quality for his new product.
If you are a student, you can get academic access to state of the art circuit design tools from Cadence Design http://www.cadence.com/support/university/pages/default.aspx
> "You won't find good engineers interested [in fixing vulnerabilities]. It's a waste of their talent."

> "He said engineers dedicated to coding will not devote time to fixing bugs."

Unless he meant to say finding the bugs or doing quality assurance, this is very elitist. Engineers dedicated to coding should fix bugs they themselves created, because it means they know the source code better than anyone, and will be able to do so with minimal effort and minimal side-effects.

Saying it's a waste of their talent made me puke a little. Coding is fixing bugs. It's a big part of development, and often takes the hardest work or most thinking. You can't just start throwing code around and expect someone else to come around and fix your bugs for you. That's ridiculous and will probably result in a culture where new bugs are created faster because there's no responsibility.

> "You have to analyse the vulnerabilities of these apps and understand attacks, at a very fast speed. We don't have that time anymore."

If you're coding a web app and you're (calling yourself) a topnotch engineer, you should understand the basics of web app security, and how to avoid the top attack vectors such as XSS, SQL injection, XSRF, etc... You really have no excuse not knowing about them, and should from the ground up code the app to avoid these vulnerabilities. Saying it'd be a waste of talent just doesn't make sense, because if you have any talent in coding, then you know about these, and you know how to code the app without creating them. It's like a reflex.

My conclusion: this CEO Philippe Courtot is full of shit.
Hidden art in the browser.

Excellent job.
The google closure compiler/optimizer supports optional type annotations in jsdoc-style comments.
I wonder if autonomous Internet surveillance understands sarcasm. You're probably on some watch list now, sad as that may be.
Nice article. What I didn't understand: How does a conservative GC without type information know where the references are in an object? E.g. given this object:

struct {

double a; // 64 bit

short b // 16 bit

int c, d; // 32+32 bit

FooPtr e; // 64 bit

int f; // 32 bit

BarPtr g; // 64 bit

}

Does it assume that all fields are aligned to 64 bit boundaries? Does it potentially consider a double to be a pointer? And how does it know where to stop looking for references without knowing the size of the object?
"I assumed there would be an additional step needed to opt-in before being billed"

Why would you assume this? I explicitly remember using the beta databases for free with the understanding that with the continued usage of those products outside of the beta period, I'd be charged.

Never assume. Always ask if you aren't sure.
Most tool require you to learn an interface to operate, and not the internals. Git is quite the opposite.

If you are learning a set of 'incantations', git will always seem hard to use. But if you take some time to learn how git works on the inside (which is really not that hard), it gets much easier to understand why and how you need to use a certain command.

Some argue that this is why git is bad, but I'd argue that this in the end is a good thing, because it gives you so much more power.

Learning how to use git is an investment, bit in my opinion an investment worthwhile.
what's the difference between Flask and Django?
Technical understanding always determines ambition!

You've given me two excellent answers in the last few weeks. (The other was on Aristotle, inter-subjective selection, and N-dimensional optimization). Thank you!
IPhone e-Signature Speed Test
Flightfox co-founder on incubators and getting 800k in funding
You are not desperate, you are playing.
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> He said engineers dedicated to coding will not devote time to fixing bugs.

That's so corporate. Engineer will do whatever is necessary to make the goddamn thing work properly.

I briefly worked at software production division of some corporation. They had funny attitude. They were building their apps in the scrum process fixing bugs as they went (reluctantly because, no story points for bugfixing and everyone loves points even though it's just a planning tool not performance measure) but when the project was considered done (by whoever made such decisions) it was promptly forgotten as if it was just perfect. As if they weren't aware that the piece of software they just architected and engineered is bug ridden piece of crud, as every software is until you spend a at least year with your users weeding bugs out.
Why Eric Schmidt is wrong about Apple-Android being the defining fight
Hey, please email us at hello@learnstreet.com and we'll help you out!
I'll start with your last question: It does know the size of objects - this size is passed to the GC when you allocate memory from it. Root ranges (such as the stack, global variables, TLS areas, etc) also all have a static size.

(Not strictly true - some runtimes have dynamically growing stacks, but the GC knows the size regardless.)

Most garbage collectors assume pointers to be aligned on a word boundary; that is on a 4-byte boundary on 32-bit machines and an 8-byte boundary on 64-bit machines. This is a reasonable assumption because accessing pointers that are not word-aligned is extremely slow on most architectures. It does not care how fields that don't contain pointers are aligned because their contents are irrelevant (so this translates to the compiler being able to pack some fields together without worrying about breaking the GC).

So, a conservative GC will simply scan over every word in an object and interpret it as a potential pointer, regardless of what it actually is. So yes - even a double will be considered a pointer.
Along those lines, do people here have any recommendations for fabrication? PCB manufacture is great, but I'm also looking for small-run SMT/assembly.
Interestingly OpenBSD has had stronger wifi support than Linux at times in the past few years. They are very aggressive about getting rid of binary blobs, so they throw a lot of effort at that problem.
It can't make that assumption- in a conservative GC, any pointer sized field in an object could be a pointer. So assuming you're on a 32 bit machine, in the above example, the double would look like 2 pointers to the GC. One way of dealing with this is, the GC keeps a set of all the address ranges that belong to its objects (these are the only objects that could be garbage collected). Then, when it sees what could be a pointer, it'll first look up whether this "maybe pointer" actually belongs to it's address range, and only if it does will it add it to the mark stack for further scanning. In terms of how does it know when to stop looking for references, actually, the GC will know the object size for any objects that it has allocated, so it knows when to stop scanning it's own object. For objects that it hasn't given out, it doesn't matter since it won't scan those. And for the stack, it'll just scan the entire stack looking for pointers to it's own objects.
I've looked on both iPad & iPhone, and it's a much better reading experience on the bigger device for these magazine-length pieces. Much like Instapaper in that respect.

I can't get any serious reading of any length done on my phone either.
Because of Mandrake: it just worked, hardware support was better, and it had a pretty GUI installer.
Thanks for the insight. At the risk of asking a question b/f RTFA, why isn't Linux Foundation using Suse/Fedora's solution?
The Making of Doom: Id's shooter masterpiece
Thanks alexrp and digitalinfinity for your replies!
Sri Lanka Increased Ciggy Taxes
Sri Lanka Increased Ciggy Taxes
Cool! I've been wanting to do this for some time and haven't gotten around to it.
I think I down-voted you by accident. I meant to upvote! Clumsy mouse movements. Great link.
Because worse is better.

If you count OSX as BSD than far more people use BSD desktops than Linux desktops. But if you count iOS and Android then it starts to become a toss up.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
Google unveils first-ever underwater “street-view” (and it’s amazing)
Internet Security  
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I wouldn't be surprised if many people enjoy using git because of its complexity. That's one reason why I consider it fun to use.
You guys might want to check out cruisewise.com, they have been doing something very similar
Was working on something similar when this came out. https://github.com/crowdint/fundraiser

Great job by the Lockitron team.
Better Audio Support in Linux So that i can watch movies and listen to songs.
I'm the author of the article. I plan to write another full tutorial on blueprints. I use them a lot but I already found this post long enough :)
> Torvalds is here disputing one of the main drivers of science

For all I know, he may also be disputing one of the main drivers of cheese making, but that's not what he was asked about. He was commenting on a specific technical and organisational challenge, where he stated that a pragmatic approach trumps ideology. This may be true/false in other domains but he wasn't addressing them.
I love Heroku and use it for everything, but I'd seriously reconsider AWS for some of my bigger apps if I could just get Elastic Beanstalk for Rack apps. Frankly, I'm shocked that this hasn't been released yet.

I'm an apps guy, not devops, and definitely not ops. I can manage an AWS deployment if I have to, but it's not on my top ten list of activities that I consider to be fun.
I'm not sure if it's ok, but I'll shamelessly plug our cloud: digitalocean.com. We have really straight forward and easy to understand pricing starting at $5. -- Jeff
I'm using blueprints too which are great to organize your app as modules. I plan to write another tutorial on that
Because of Lawyers.
Can you still open your own designs when you stop being a student?
This is great. Much better speed than http://tour.golang.org for people who already know other languages. Thanks!
BOS2012 Personal Lessons Learned
Years ago when I had to make the choice, it was easy: Linux supported a larger amount of hardware. I didn't really want to spend all of my time writing drivers when I had other work to do.
Yeah I'm going to fix that. I published the article too early by mistake with a few errors still left
"Best reading experience out there" or "Best reading experience out there once you add in all the various extraneous factors such as large libraries at hand, instant download, etc"?

I think the former award still goes to ink-on-paper†, pretty decisively, but the latter is a bit more complicated...

† Given a nice format of course; my favorite is Japanese "bunko" (文庫)
> First, there's no POSIX standard way to communicate this scheduling request to the kernel. So you either have to add a new API or add some "secret knock" to an existing API that will trigger the desired behavior. Neither of these encourage portable code, and neither help existing, deployed applications, which would have to be modified to get the desired result.

Linux doesn't fully comply with posix and has many of it's own apis. Cross platform applications either abstract this away themselves or libraries do it for them. I doubt a database doesn't use a lot of os specific features.
The dirty truth: Marketing.

Back in the 90s there was a major push to market Linux by a wide number of vendors from Red Hat to IBM if I recall correctly. In the dot.com 1.0 era you couldn't leave a tradeshow without being given a t-shirt or stuffed toy of the tux mascot. You could also go into a bookstore, but a book on a book on Linux and get a free CD with an installer. You could also go into a computer store of that era and buy a boxed copy of Linux. This made Linux really popular with the first generation of web geeks.
...can you elaborate on why? really, I'm interested. I mean I get that having the same OS for a server and for a desktop simplifies things, but... how did you arrive at OpenBSD? ...did you first go through FreeBSD? I'm sure other people will be thankful too if you'd blog about your experience!

(Note: I'm currently investigating a "cheapest to maintain" solution, and by this I mean man-hours, not upfront costs, so I could choose Windows Server just as well - not that I would do that - for both my personal server and the servers of a bunch of NGOs that I help with sysadmin stuff for free... and was wondering if something like FreeBSD was better than Ubuntu Server LTS ...I want something that I could just "drop it there and leave it running for 5 years", but at the same time there will be some packages - like webserver and related that I will want to keep to the latest stable versions, like upgrading every few months or so; and yes, I do care about security, so being of to date on all security fixes and at the same time not having to keep fixing an recompiling stuff...)
5 Mobile Linux OSes that Dare to Compete with Android
We encouraged them to, but they felt that it was too complicated and violated their understanding of the trust model. I obviously disagree, and I'm obviously not impressed by the Linux Foundation picking an approach that's at odds with 100% of the member companies who've voiced opinions on the topic, but the Technical Advisory Board is an autonomous group with no community oversight so there's little opportunity to influence them.
Probably better hardware support. Also FreeBSD installation has been extremely arcane until recently.

I'm a long BSD fan, worked professionally on FreeBSD kernel and used OpenBSD a lot (and still do!).

However you can find BSD in many appliances and if you have a Mac, you use FreeBSD!
While I haven't yet had to open a ticket through the new interface yet, in the past I've received rapid, competent direct answers from Heroku staff, both as a 'free tier' and then (very modest) paid-level user.

So these knocks against Heroku don't ring true for me. I even have to wonder if the author overlooked pointers/responses/notices (as with his opt-in-before-billing-begins assumption).
I feel like I'm missing something, aren't read replicas run in read-only mode? How would one run long running DDL operations on them?
> Wow, it wasn't that long ago when this was flamebait of the highest order.

Judging from the tenor of some of the responses, I'd say it still is... oO;
Una fotógrafa ha culpado de su fracaso y salud
I always knew Rails was evil!
In answer to my own question, looks like it's possible to disable read_only:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=281451
If there's an announcement on that Facebook page, it's private, and so maybe it should remain so until there's an official obituary or announcement from the family.
This is a good suggestion. Affiliate marketing worked out really well for me. I did a ton of it back in 2009. I got a $100 fb ad coupon and before I was done with it I discovered a profitable facebook ad campaign. I then scaled that basic concept across the English, Spanish and French speaking worlds. It was long before anyone would pay me as a consultant, and it financed a cross country adventure.
There are things like Freenet and I2P.

And thanks to WebRTC we may see these sorts of things running in the browser soon.
I have a friend who works for Saudi Aramco. They tried to play down the effects of the attack, but they had to replace 30,000 hard drives. My friend's work for the past year was wiped out. The only people who were saved were those who made local back-ups on USB drives which were not connected. In most large companies, there are strict rules about connecting personal hard drives to the company's network, but in this case, those who violated the rules were able to survive the attack best. Back-ups were compromised as well. It is not clear why Aramco did not have back-ups which were offline and accessible.
Sad. Jay was my old neighbor in Fairfax, VA. Awesome guy.

What was the cause of death?
Airlines ticket cancellation in India provoked us to do this
> The data was stolen from a shared folder on the college's main file server, and it contained social security numbers and dates of birth for over 200,000 Florida students from across the state who had applied for scholarships

Somebody should be fired over this.
"Your government dollars at work" I guess ... :/